facilities are simulated, resource requirements and enterprise budgets compiled, and opera- tion and management schedules determined so that fish production objectives are achieved.
When facility requirements or production objectives are found to be operationally or economically unacceptable, desired results are obtained through iterative design refinement.
Facility performance is reported to the user as management schedules, summary reports, enterprise budgets, and tabular and graphical compilations of time-series data for unit
process, fish, and water quality variables. Application of AquaFarm to various types of aquaculture systems is demonstrated. AquaFarm is applicable to a range of aquaculture
interests, including education, development, and production. © 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords
:
Aquaculture; Decision support system; Computer; Design; Modeling; Simulation; Software
1. Introduction
Aquaculture facility design and management planning require expertise in a variety of disciplines and an ability to perform computationally intensive analyses.
First, following specification of the physical, chemical, biological, and management processes used to represent a given facility, quantitative procedures are required to
model these processes, project future facility performance, and determine facility operational constraints and capacities. Second, management of large datasets is
often necessary, including facility and management specifications, projected facility performance and management schedules, and resource and economic budgets.
Finally, design procedures require many calculations, especially when: 1 multiple fish lots and fish rearing units are considered; 2 simulation procedures are used to
generate facility performance and management schedules; 3 alternative design and management strategies are compared; 4 designs are adjusted and optimized
through a series of iterative facility performance tests; and 5 production econom- ics are compared over a range of production scales. Such analyses can be used to
optimize production output with respect to required management intensity and resource consumption or costs and to explore tradeoffs between fish biomass
densities maintained and fish production throughput achieved residence time of fish in a facility.
To address these challenges, computer software tools for facility design and management planning can embody expertise in aquaculture science and engineering
and serve as mechanisms of technology transfer to education, development, and production. In addition, computer tools can assume the burden of data manage-
ment and calculation processing and thereby reduce the workload of design and planning analyses. A current listing and description of software for aquaculture
siting, planning, design, and management is available on the Internet Ernst, 1998. Much of this software falls under the general heading of decision support systems
Sprague and Watson, 1986; Hopgood, 1991, in which quantitative methods and models, rule-based planning and diagnostic procedures expert systems, and data-
bases are packaged into interactive software applications. The application of decision support systems to aquaculture is relatively recent and has been preceded
by the development of simulation models for research purposes. Foretelling these trends, decision support systems have been developed for agriculture for purposes
of market analysis, selection of crop cultivars, crop production, disease diagnosis, and pesticide application.
The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the development and application of AquaFarm Ver. 1.0, Microsoft Windows
